Category Archives: NetApp

That’s right folks, not the 8.4 you were thinking was next, but straight to 9. With the jump to 9 in the versioning also comes a bit of rebranding. When referring to the OS of your FAS, you can finally simply say ONTAP, no more qualifying that with “7-mode” or “clustered” or even prefixing it with “Data”. Alongside this new version comes two variants, one that runs in the cloud and one that you can run in your VMware environment. ONTAP Cloud and ONTAP Select respectively. Currently ONTAP Cloud is AWS only, but all signs point to an Azure release in the very near future. ONTAP Select picks up where Edge left off.

I’ve had some helm time with the new version and the first thing you’ll notice is that System Manager has been cleaned up and rearranged. When you first login, you’ll now get the following dashboard with a quick view of your cluster:

This dashboard is good for a quick glance at performance and capacity, but clicking around the other tabs still leaves something to be desired on the usability front, but only because there is just so much available in this interface. I feel like I’ve got the “advanced view” option permantly checked off. Personally I don’t mind all the various tabs and sub-tabs, but for your day-to-day operator, most of the options available aren’t necessary.

Moving over to the technical side of the equation, ONTAP 9 brings with it a few new exciting features. First of all, support for the new 15.3TB SSDs makes its way into the payload, as well as RAID-TEC triple-parity protection. As far as I know, NetApp will be first to market with these 15.3’s and I can’t wait to see them in the field. RAID-TEC, or RAID Triple Erasure Coding will really help out with the larger disk sizes. While it won’t be mandatory for the large SSDs, I highly recommend it for spinning drives >= 6TB. These drives currently have a max RAID group size of 14, but the introduction of RAID-TEC will increase that to 28 drives. This will not only double your RAID protection level and decrease rebuild times, but most importantly the RAID tax won’t be so bad in the larger deployments. If you’ve already got these large drives deployed, you can move to RAID-TEC and larger RAID groups provided you have the disks to add to the aggregate.

In the realm of performance, NetApp is claiming a 60% increase in IOPS over 8.3.1, as well as the introduction of “Headroom for visibility of performance capacity”. What this means is that at a glance, you should be able to see how much more performance is left in your cluster. NetApp has also introduced a new data-reduction technology called Data Compaction. With this latest addition to the existing data reduction tricks, namely deduplication, compression, cloning and thin-provisioning NetApp is now boasting a 4:1 data reduction number and is backing it with a guarantee.

Finally, two more feature introductions for the compliance-minded folks out there. First you’ll be happy to hear SnapLock® software is back, and for those not looking to introduce the cost and complexity of an external key manager for NSE drives, NetApp has introduced an onboard key manager.

Make sure to check out some of the other posts on this subject by my fellow NetApp A-Team members:

Just a quick note now that 8.3.2 is now GA and here’s a few features that I may have missed in my combined post on 8.3.1 and 8.3.2 or the details of which just weren’t available to me. I’ll start by reiterating some of the highlights in point form:

Copy Free Transition (CFT)

In-line DeDupe (on AFF)

In-place, adaptive compression

Those were some of the more poignant features, but here’s some others that I either didn’t know about or just weren’t to me:

MetroCluster distance increased by 50% bringing it to 300KM

Oracle NFS workload provisioning for All Flash FAS (AFF)

Using a Quick Start guide, and a wizard in the on-board OnCommand System Manager, the claim is you can have your new AFF cabled and serving Oracle over NFS in under 15 minutes.

The real beauty in this release however is in regards to CFT. I’ve said it before, but I’m still impressed by this feature. Basically you can stand up a new cDOT system with it’s own root aggregates and connect your 7-mode disk to it (yes there’s caveats) and with some 7MTT magic smoke, your data is now being served out of your shiny, new cluster-mode environment. Previously 7MTT (7-mode Transition Tool) only supported source data in the 8.1.x code line, but with this new release, 7MTT now supports 7-Mode systems running Data ONTAP 8.1.4P4 – 8.1.4P9 and Data ONTAP 8.2.1 or later. Also, in 8.3.2RC, CFT would only work on a net-new system with only its root aggregates, but in the 8.3.2GA, CFT now supports importing your 7-mode disk on to 8.3.2GA systems with pre-existing data aggregates and volumes. Here are all the permutations that you can now leverage CFT to import your 7-mode data:

Import 7-Mode disk shelves in the following ways:

Import disk shelves from a 7-Mode HA pair to a new HA pair in a new cluster.

Import disk shelves from a 7-Mode HA pair to a new HA pair in an existing cluster that has additional data-serving nodes.

Import disk shelves from a 7-Mode HA pair to an HA pair that has data aggregates in an existing cluster that is serving data.

Import disk shelves from an HA pair that contains volumes in a volume SnapMirror relationship to an HA pair in a new or existing cluster.
You must manually create the cluster peer relationship after transition; however, a rebaseline transfer is not required, and you can retain the SnapMirror relationship after transition.

*UPDATE: The above is actually more a function of 7MTT 2.3, but you need it for CFT anyway.

For all the gory details of CFT and how awesome it is, go here for your copy of the Copy-Free Transition Guide.

What does all this actually mean? It means that soon we can finally stop referring to “it” as either 7-mode or cluster-mode and just refer to “it” as ONTAP or Data ONTAP again.

If you’re a NetApp nerd like myself or if you prefer to call yourself an “avid NetApp user”, then you’re probably familiar with their annual conference, NetApp Insight and the fact that is is just around the corner. Since you’re reading this article at all, you may already have or have at least considered getting certified. There’s not a lot new since the major update back in April when the exams were updated to reflect the release of 8.3 but there is at least one completely new exam and certification, the NetApp Certified Storage Installation Engineer, Clustered Data ONTAP NS0-180, which becomes available on September 23, 2015.

This year at Insight, there’s going to be a whopping 14 separate exam prep sessions at both the Las Vegas and Berlin versions of the conference covering the following:

NS0-155, NCDA 7-Mode

NS0-157, NCDA cDOT

NS0-505, NCIE-SAN E-Series

NS0-506, NCIE-SAN cDOT

NS0-511, NCIE-Data Protection

The beauty of Insight is that during the course of the conference, you can take as many exams for free as you’d like as long as it falls within their exam retake policy. If the exam centre is anything like year’s past, then it will be very busy and I highly recommend you pre-register for up to there of your exams now over here.

While we’re on the topic of certifications, NetApp is going to show the proverbial love to those of us who are already certified as well as to those who get certified while at Insight. I won’t give away all the details, but there will be different schwag based on what certifications you already hold. They’re also going to hold the first ever Appreciation and Recognition event for the NetApp Certified.

So with all this talk about certifications, lets talk about getting prepared for getting certified. The first thing you should do is follow @NetAppCertify on Twitter, join in the discussion over at the NetAppU Community and peruse the materials and sample exams available here. Sample exams are available for NS0-157, NS0-506, NS0-511 and the latest addition, NS0-180. If you’ve already have your NAIPCDOT, you’ll need to to earn the NCSIE cDOT by November 1, 2016, so I’m sure this will be a popular one. For the complete low-down on what NS0-180 might mean to you, check out this NetApp Community entry here. Lastly, be sure to check out The Value of NetApp Certification Video as well, especially since some of my friends are in it.

Finally, to further emphasize the value of NetApp Certifications, starting in October you’ll be able to add all new digital badges to your LinkedIn profile which will help job-seekers and recruiters find each other.

This new Digital Badge helps protect the value of your certification as well as providing easy verification of your NetApp Certifications.

Insight is just over a month a way as of this writing, and it’s time to start studying so that you can take advantage of those free exams which by now you’ve registered for, right? I know I have.

At the Las Vegas version of Insight, make sure you stop by The Geek & Greet Certification Appreciation Event, Wednesday at 5:15 and say hi to me and my fellow A-Team members, we may even buy you a beer.

Today NetApp announced the next major release of its Clustered data ONTAP operating system and a major release it is. This is the first release of ONTAP that does not include the dual payload of both 7-mode and cluster-mode and will be the norm going forward. This release has three major themes:

The first theme brings with it performance enhancements in the following ways:

More consistent and predictable performance and higher IOPS at lower latency in the All Flash FAS (AFF) and other flash-enabled systems thanks to read-path optimization.

The CIFS lock manager has been paralleled bringing improvements to CIFS-based file-services workloads.

The initial transfer as well as incremental updates for both SnapMirror and SnapVault relationships have been improved.

8.3 has been optimized for more CPU cores bringing performance enhancements to pre-FAS8000 systems. Initial claims are that FAS62xx performance is similar those running 8.1 while the FAS3xxxx and FAS22xx are showing 8.1-type performance in SAN deployments.

As far as efficiency enhancements are concerned, a long awaited feature by myself is Advanced Disk Partitioning (ADP) which has three use cases:

Root-data partitioning for All Flash FAS (AFF) systems.

Root-data partitioning for Entry-level platforms.

SSD partitioning for Flash Pools

The first two use cases mentioned above will greatly ease the dedicated root aggregate disk tax which has been the bane of the SMB buyers since cDOT’s initial (non-GX) release, providing 20+% increase in storage efficiency in 24-drive FAS255x as well as the FAS2240. This will be the default configuration for systems purchased with 8.3 but if you wish to retrofit an existing system you’ll have to evacuate your data and start fresh. As far as the third use case is concerned, the benefit here is the parity disk tax as represented by the graphic below:

Other efficiency enhancements come in the way of addressable cache, in fact the complete complement of contemporary systems (read: FAS80xx and FAS25xx) has been quadrupled. Also, the 16KB cutoff for Flash Pool has been eliminated, compress blocks are now read cacheable as are read-only volumes such as SnapMirror and SnapVault destinations.

Simplified Deployment, upgrade, transition, and support

In the never ending quest to make their product easier to deploy, transition to and use NetApp brings the following laundry list of improvements.

System Setup 3.0

Support of AFF aggregate creation

8.3 networking support (More on this in a subsequent post.)

Four port cluster interconnect support

System Manager 3.2

This becomes a cluster-hosted web service which can be reached from the network using Mozilla, Chrome and IE on Windows, Linux and Mac platforms.

8.3 networking support

Automated NDU

Three commands to upgrade your cluster.

One command to monitor the progress.

Networking

There is a whole litany of changes/improvements, too many to list here. The biggest one however may be IPSpaces so know you can have overlapping subnets in those multi-tenant environments.

Virtualization

vVol support (pending VMware support)

FlexClone for SVI

Inline zero write detection and elimination.

7MTT

Version 1.4 will bring with it a new collect and asses feature to validate the destination cluster based on the assessment of the source 7-mode system.

2.0 brings with it the much sought after SAN migration.

Clustered ONTAP in mission critical environments with MetroCluster

Not a whole lot more to say around that except that it is finally here. Some of the highlights are:

Two node cluster at either site

Clients can be served from all four nodes at the same time

Support for Non Disruptive Operations (NDO)

While I covered a lot in this post, I didn’t cover everything as 8.3 is a major release indeed. Now the big question many of you will have is what platforms will support it? Look no further:

FAS8xxx

FAS25xx

FAS62xx

FAS32xx (except the FAS3210)

FAS22xx

As for what I didn’t cover in this post but you may wish to research further:

Today NetApp announced the successors to their entry-level line of FAS storage arrays: the FAS2552, FAS2254 and the FAS2520 which replace the FAS2240-2, FAS2240-4 and FAS2220 respectively.

Why is this important? Until now, in order to run Clustered Data ONTAP, you had to use your one and only expansion option for a 10GbE card for the cluster interconnect network, giving up any chance of deploying Fibre Channel. Technically, since this was a two-port card, you could still provide 10GbE uplink at the expense of redundancy on the ClusterNet backend. However, the new models give up the mezzanine slot altogether in favour of a minimum of 4 ×10GbE on board on the FAS2520 to 4 ×UTA2 ports on both the FAS2552 and FAS2554.

Highlights:

With this refresh NetApp continues to use the same dual-core, hyper-threaded, 1.73GHz Jasper Forest processors as before – which, incidentally, was specifically designed for both embedded and storage applications — but the quantity is doubled to four, not to mention there’s a three-fold increase in memory. All of this added memory increases the ability for Data ONTAP to address more flash, raising the Flash Pool™caching limit to 4TB. Finally, with the addition of onboard 10GbE across the line, NetApp closes the gap in regard to ClusterNet interconnect requirements. The minimum version of ONTAP required for either 7-mode or Cluster-Mode will be the one it ships with, 8.2.2RC1.

FAS2520

The FAS2520A is a 2U appliance supporting 12 SAS, SATA, and NSE drives internally, and up to 72 additional drives externally. Connectivity is provided by 4×6GB SAS ports, 4×1GbE interfaces and 8×10GBASE-T. Unlike its predecessor, there are no expansion slots.

NetApp’s new FAS2520, rear view.

FAS2552/FAS2554

The FAS2552A is a 2U appliance supporting 24 SAS, NSE and SSD drives internally and the FAS2554A is a 4U appliance supporting SATA, NSE and SSD drives internally; both models support up to an additional 120 drives externally. Connectivity is provided by 4×6GB SAS ports, 4x1GbE interfaces and 8×UTA2 ports. The UTA2 ports can be configured as either 8Gb FC, 16Gb FC, or 10GbE. The 10GbE configuration does indeed support FCoE as well as the usual CIFS, NFS and iSCSI options. Due to the fact that each pair of ports is driven by one ASIC, the UTA2 ports must be configured in pairs. However, it should be noted that their personality can be modified in the field; this requires a reboot as well as the requisite SFP.

NetApp’s new FAS2552, rear view.

NetApp’s new FAS2554, rear view.

Summary

With this second round of major updates to the FAS systems this year, the entire line is now truly Clustered Data ONTAP-ready, with every model sporting 10 Gig connectivity on-board. What I find most noteworthy is the amount of RAM that has been added which significantly increases the amount of flash-based cache the devices can address. Flash Pools abound!